Struts & Frets Read online

  Now that I was closer, I saw that he had actually brought out two chairs. Had he planned this?

  “How long have you been out here, Gramps?” I asked as I sat down.

  “As long as Davis’s Kind of Blue album,” he said. “I wonder why I can remember every note in that album but I can’t remember who the president is.” He sighed and looked back up into the night sky.

  We sat there in silence for a little while. Then I said, “So why are you sitting here?”

  “I’m looking for the moon,” he said.

  “The moon? It’s right there.” I pointed at the half-moon hanging in front of us.

  “That?” he asked, his lip curling up a little. “That’s a big rock with astronaut footprints that floats around in space.”

  There was another silence.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said. “That’s the moon.”

  “When I was a boy, the moon was something different. It was magic. It was mysterious. Some people said a man lived up there.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Haven’t you ever heard of the man in the moon?”

  “Well,” I said. “That R.E.M. song . . .”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Anyway, people believed there was a wise old man who lived on the moon. You could see his face on certain nights.”

  I looked up at the moon now. At the dark craters on its surface. Maybe sometimes the craters lined up in a way that looked kind of like a face. I couldn’t see it, though.

  “Other people,” continued Gramps, “said aliens lived up there in giant subterranean caverns.”

  “Okay, now you’re messing with me,” I said.

  He smiled and shook his head. “No one knew for sure because there was no way of knowing. Anything was possible.” He rubbed his dry, wrinkled hands together and his face darkened. “But Kennedy needed a new measuring stick against the commies, some way to show America’s dominance that didn’t involve launching nukes, so they picked space. First one to the moon wins. And that night—that horrible night— when what’s-his-name walked on the moon, that was the moment the moon’s magic died. When it was no longer the moon. Just a rock floating in space.” He scratched his beard slowly. Rhythmically. Then he said, “And I’ve been looking for the moon ever since.” He turned to me then. “You’re like me,” he said. “Always reaching for the moon.”

  “Gramps, I know what the moon is.”

  He chuckled quietly. “Is that what you think? That you’re just like everyone else? All the other boring farts out there just trying to live a sorry, carefree life? You might wish that were true. I can’t blame you. Looking for the moon is hard. There’s so many times when you’ve run out of hope and you feel like it’s impossible. But it is possible. I know that for a fact.”

  He stared up into the sky for a little while, then said, “I know it because I touched it once. It was the night Chet Baker came to town and asked me to sit in on a set. Now, I know some people say he was a mediocre horn player and that he didn’t really come into his own until he got his front teeth knocked out in a bar fight and had to do more singing and less playing. And maybe his playing wasn’t the sharpest or most innovative. But that man knew where the music was. Where the moon was. And he showed me that night. Wouldn’t let me fall back on my usual tricks of stylish trills and fancy footwork. He just kept shaking his head, right there in the middle of the set with an audience looking on and saying, ‘Come on, Jack. You’re more than that. Reach further. You can do it.’ So I kept trying, kept ranging further out on solos and riffs and when it came around for me to take the Russ Freeman ‘Summer Sketch’ lead, I just pushed and pushed and I couldn’t even believe what my fingers were doing and damn if he wasn’t right. That song woke something up in me. It made me realize that there was something I’d been missing. And one thing I knew, I was going to hold on to it.”

  He shook his head. “But you can’t. Not for long, anyway. Life beats it out of you real quick. So you just have to keep looking for it, over and over again. And you hope that someday you’ll be able to hold on forever.”

  He closed his eyes and was quiet for a little while. So long, actually, that I started to wonder if he’d fallen asleep. But then he said, “It’s a beautiful thing when you touch it. But there’s an awful price to pay. Look what it did to me. And I’m one of the lucky ones.” Then he opened his eyes and looked once more into the night sky and sighed. “But it was worth it. Such wonder. Such magic.”

  When I got home, Mom was sitting on the couch still, but the TV was off, and she had a glass of wine in one hand and a paperback novel in the other. I sat down next to her and waited for her to look up.

  “How was he?” she asked.

  “Really calm,” I said. “I haven’t seen him like that in a long time. I had almost forgot what he used to be like.”

  She nodded. “It comes and goes.” Then she put down her book. She gave me her serious therapist look and put her hand on my shoulder. “He’s slipping away from us, you know.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I knew that. Do you think he knows?”

  “Probably,” she said. “Although when I’ve brought it up, he denies it.” She took a sip of her white wine and stared out the dark window. “Imagine how awful that must be. To feel like you’re slowly sinking into a confusing dream and to suddenly come up for air and everything is clear. But you know it won’t last. That you’ll sink back down, further and further each time, until you never come back.”

  I stared at the blank TV for a little while. Mom drank her wine.

  “Do you ever worry?” I asked at last. “That you’ll go crazy like him?”

  She laughed. “Worry? I can’t wait! Then someone else can listen to me ramble on for hours.”

  The thing that always bothered me about Sundays was that during the day it was a weekend, but at night it was a school night. It was hard enough to concentrate on homework other nights. But homework on a Sunday was almost impossible.

  I had to write a short essay about Macbeth. Ms. Jansen gave us a question in our last class:

  Do you think Macbeth was evil? Do you think he deserved his fate? Why or why not?

  When I first thought about it, I was like, totally. He kills all these people just because he wants to be king. So I figured it was going to be a pretty easy essay to write. But then, as I sat down to actually write it, I started thinking something else. What gets him going down that path to killing everybody? Well, it’s the witches telling him that he’s going to be king. He wasn’t even thinking about it before that. But once they plant that idea in his head, he gets excited about it. But even then, when it comes down to it, he still doesn’t want to kill the king. But then his wife basically tells him that he’s not a man unless he does it. So of course he does, because he’s this dumb meathead jock who’s a sucker for that kind of line. He’s totally manipulated into the whole thing. And then things just keep getting worse and worse. He feels so bad about what he’s done, but he isn’t willing to fess up, so the guilt just drives him crazy. It’s not that he’s evil. He’s just a wuss. He has this idea of what he thinks he wants, and he won’t let that go, even though it’s so incredibly obvious it’s not turning out the way he wanted at all. So maybe he isn’t evil, but anybody who refuses to do what they’re supposed to do, just because it’s not what they thought they wanted, deserves to get shafted.

  Right?

  Wait . . .

  That’s when I put down the pen and picked up the phone.

  “Ah, the elusive Mr. Bojar!” said Jen5 when she answered.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “I’ve called you three times this weekend. What’s up, are you mad at me?”

  I could tell by the way she said it that she was joking. But when I didn’t say anything, she asked again, but quiet and a little worried-sounding.

  “Are you?”

  I’d been trying to think of how I was going to bring this up all day. All weekend, really
. But I hadn’t been able to think of anything, so I just asked point-blank, “Do you like me?”

  “No, actually your mom pays me to be your friend,” she said.

  “No, I mean, do you like me?”

  The silence was so long I wondered if she’d left the phone off the hook and just walked away. But finally she said, “We can’t do this over the phone. Can you get out of the house right now?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

  “Meet me at the park in ten minutes.”

  Then she hung up.

  I went downstairs. Mom was still in her chair reading, but at some point she had brought the whole bottle of wine out. I guess so she didn’t have to walk to the fridge every time she needed to refill her glass.

  “Mom,” I said. “Can I go out for a bit?”

  She looked at me in surprise, then looked at the clock, then back at me.

  “Sammy, it’s ten o’clock on a school night.”

  “Please, Mom,” I said. “It’s really important. It’s . . .” I hesitated. I knew I had to make her understand that this was major and I wasn’t just being a pain in the ass, but I really didn’t want to talk to her about it. “It’s . . . the thing that’s been bugging me all weekend.” Was that enough?

  She regarded me carefully, I guess trying to read if this was teenage BS or the real deal. At last she said, “Okay, Sammy. But be smart.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said. Then for some reason, it just came out of my mouth: “Thanks for trusting me.”

  She looked like I’d just said something insanely shocking. Then, even weirder, it looked like she was suddenly about to cry. She blinked rapidly and smiled.

  “Get out of here, kid,” she said hoarsely.

  Jen5 and I used to hang out at Schiller Park a lot before I got the Boat, since it was within walking distance for both of us. It was pretty big. A huge playground, a rec center, basketball courts, a pond stocked with fish, even an outdoor amphitheater where they did Shakespeare every summer. She and I had spent a lot of summer afternoons in that park, just hanging out and talking about parents, friends, movies, music, art, books, whatever. We’d stay until after sunset. Sometimes a cop showed up after dark and kicked us out. He always looked kind of disappointed that we weren’t doing anything bad. But those were simpler times, when we were more excited about the new Johnny Depp movie than about sex and beer.

  When I got there, I could see Jen5’s silhouette against the bright white security lights. She sat on a swing, swaying back and forth and dragging her feet a little in the gravel. I walked over and sat in the swing next to hers. We were quiet for a while. The creak of the swing chains was loud in my ears.

  Then Jen5 said, “So I guess Rick wasn’t talking about being a homo when I showed up on Friday.”

  “He was talking about that, too,” I said. “But that wasn’t what we were talking about when you came in.”

  She nodded and let the swing shift back and forth some more. Then she said, “I wasn’t trying to keep anything from you. I was just worried that if I brought it up, it would make things weird between us.”

  “Like it is now,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. Her bright paisley eyes gleamed in the harsh lighting. “Look, if we were . . . together . . . God, that sounds so lame. Whatever. Anyway, if we were, the way I see it, things wouldn’t be that much different, really.”

  “What?”

  “Think about it. We’d still be friends. But instead of talking all the time, we just talk most of the time and then, you know . . . make out and stuff the rest of the time.”

  For a moment I couldn’t quite understand what she was saying. It was like my brain had to back out from the spot where it was parked, turn around, and pull into this new spot that I hadn’t seen before. The way she explained it seemed so reasonable.

  “I mean,” she went on. “We’re both virgins, right? And I don’t know about you, but I’d sure to like to . . . try some stuff. You know?”

  “Uh,” I said. “Yeah.” My heart was suddenly pounding so hard, I could literally feel it in my throat.

  “So, wouldn’t it be better to try stuff with someone you trust? With someone you . . .”

  She looked away, stared hard at her shoes.

  It took a second for me to get enough saliva back in my mouth to talk. And when I did, all that came out was, “What?”

  “I mean,” she said quietly, “Unless you just don’t see me that way.”

  Maybe this is terrible and means that secretly I’m a total dick. Or maybe it’s just one of those things that’s human nature. Either way, her sudden weakness made me feel stronger. It made me feel, for the first time, like I was the one in control of this situation. And that feeling gave me the confidence to make a choice.

  I lunged across the swing chain and kissed her.

  At first it totally didn’t work. I pretty much just mashed my face against hers. Stupid and clumsy and not sexy at all. We both got tangled in the swing chains and then we just kind of fell over onto the ground in a heap. But that didn’t stop us. We just kept on going. And kissing Jen5 felt a lot different from how I thought it would. Usually her attitude was always kind of hard and rough, so I guess I expected her kiss to feel rough too. But instead, she felt soft and warm in a way that I didn’t even realize she could be. It made me think that there were so many things I didn’t know about her. So many things I didn’t understand. And yet she was my best friend. While we kissed in the gravel under the fluorescent lights in the park, the two Jen5s—my buddy and the hot chick—merged into one really amazing girl.

  Then a bright light hit my face. I pulled away quickly.

  “Wha—” Jen5 said. Then she saw.

  A cop stood at the entrance, shining his flashlight at us.

  “Park’s closed,” he said. “You kids go on home.”

  He looked very pleased with himself.

  on holding hands in the hallway and other goofy dating stuff. At first, I told her no way. But she said it was an experiment. I didn’t understand what she meant exactly, but I played along. So there we were, walking around holding hands all day like a couple of complete tools. I thought for sure we’d get all kinds of comments. But we didn’t. No one seemed to notice, even. I guess because we always hung out together anyway, most of the school just assumed we’d already been dating.

  On the drive over to rehearsal, I told Rick that Jen5 and I were officially dating.

  All he said was, “About time.”

  “Why am I the only person that didn’t see this coming?” I asked.

  “Do you know what an idiot savant is?” asked Rick.

  “I’m pretty sure you’re going to tell me, and it’s going to be insulting,” I said.

  “Kind of. It’s someone who’s really good at one thing and sucks at everything else.”

  “Oh, right, like I’m such a brilliant musician that I’m totally clueless about everything else.”

  “Nah, I was thinking that you’re really brilliant about being an idiot about girls.”

  “That’s why I have a gayfriend,” I told him. “You can advise me because you’re more connected to your feminine side.”

  Rick raised an eyebrow. “Gayfriend?” he asked.

  “I just made it up,” I said.

  “I can tell. And anyway, sullen emo boy, you’re way more feminine than I am. I’ll bet you even shower daily.”

  “Uh . . . yeah,” I said. “You don’t?”

  He leaned back in his seat, looked out the window, and smirked. “My natural scent is far more appealing.”

  “To who?” I asked.

  The Parks and Rec building where we rehearsed was downtown in an old, faded blue cement-block structure with hardly any windows. There were lots of meeting rooms, a gym, and probably a lot of other stuff I didn’t know about. The only thing that I really cared about was the old dance studio in the back where we rehearsed.

  As soon as we walked through the heavy front door of the building,
we could hear the sound of hard drumming coming from all the way down the hall.

  I looked at Rick.

  He shrugged and said, “Guess TJ found out about you and Fiver.”

  “That’s way too loud,” I said. “We’re totally going to get yelled at.” We were always getting yelled at by people who worked there. It seemed like they might be getting pretty close to kicking us out.

  “Come on,” I said. “We better quiet him down before Joe gets here.”

  We stopped in front of the closed door to the dance studio and just stood there for a second, listening to TJ totally murder the drum kit.

  “You have to admit,” said Rick. “Romantic angst seems to work for him. He sounds like he’s on fire in there.”

  “This is going to be awkward, isn’t it?” I asked.

  There was a crash from inside that was so loud, it sounded like TJ had split a cymbal in half.

  “What gives you that idea?” asked Rick.

  I opened the door and hot, sweaty air slapped me in the face, followed by the unmuffled sound of TJ whaling on his kit in a way I didn’t even think he was capable of. The bass felt like a kick in the chest, the cymbals like needles in my ears, the snare like a punch in the mouth, and the whole thing came together like someone had just stuck my wet finger in an electrical socket. I almost couldn’t believe it was really him. His T-shirt was off and wrapped around his head in a makeshift headband to keep sweat out of his eyes. He was usually way too skinny, hunched, and zitty to get away with being shirtless, but at that moment it was just part of a picture of a guy totally plugged into his music and kicking the shit out of his inner demons. I knew I was supposed to stop him. Calm him down. But this was what Gramps had been talking about. In that moment, I was witnessing TJ touch the moon. And how could you stop something that clearly brilliant and still call yourself a musician? So Rick and I just drifted into the room, mesmerized by the sound and raw power.

  “STOP!”

  TJ jerked to a halt, his eyes a little glazed.

  Joe stood in the doorway, his face a reddish-purple snarl. Laurie stood a little bit behind him, cringing like a puppy.